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The Living Soul in Toni Morrison’s NovelsMyung-su KongThis paper aims at analyzing the living soul of the African Americans based on Toni Morrison’s novels. The African’s cyclical concept of time perceives death as a significant phase in a movement that includes birth, life, death, and rebirth. Morrison weaves this cosmological view into the African value of mothering, which is found in African Americans’ lives to assure the continuity of the clan through the birth and nurture of the children. Morrison’s living soul is implicit in the reciprocity that exists between the living and the living dead. This archetypal living soul flows in Eva’s and Sethe’s nurturing spirits that destroy Plum and Beloved to give them new lives. Their children are dead in body, but not in spirit, if they are remembered by the surviving members of their family. The mothers’ major role is to give their children something potential to survive with. Accordingly, being independent, adventurous, inquisitive, and strong-willed, Sula represents the creative energy of life immanent in African Americans. Realizing his genealogy related with Lincoln’s Heaven and the Macon Deads, Milkman understands the context of the traditional African culture which embraces the living and the living dead. Ultimately, in Morrison’s novels, the African circular cosmology reinforces the survival power maintaining the blackness in the midst of a linear white culture.

Horror, Self, and Self-Consuming Writing:Poe’s “The Fall of the House of Usher”Eun-Hye KooPoe’s “The Fall of the House of Usher” demonstrates indeterminacy resulting in self-division. In the text, self-multiplication is realized by doubling the divided self of the narrator in the persons of Roderick Usher, and his twin sister, Madeline Usher. In Usher’s room, which is the indeterminate location and has an indeterminate form, the narrator paces, keeping time with the pacing of his double Roderick who suffers from schizophrenia. After the premature burial of Roderick’s double, Madeline, his mental disorder noticeably deepens, until he becomes a victim of the terror that exists only in his mind. In the final scene, as with the physical structure of the House of Usher, Roderick sinks into the abyss of the tarn. Death, selflessness, nothingness, and indeterminacy are inevitable result of the self-division. As “the voice of a thousand waters” become silent, the “House of Usher” (family, mansion, and story) as world of words is no more: the story is over, the text consumes itself into the tarn. Roderick’s, the narrator’s, and reader’s terror can be considered in the postmodern aesthetic context of Lyotard’s sublimity, which puts forth the unpresentable in presentation itself. In this fashion, fear and self-division become representative of the unpresentable and inscrutable nature of reality.

The Equality of Both Sexes in Walker’sThe Color PurpleGil-soo KimThis study examines The Color Purple by Alice Walker with the viewpoint of both sexes equality. Walker sticks to not only her black feminist tradition but also Hurston’s narrative strategy. She describes the women's oppression in relation to the sexual discrimination and the patriarchal ideology through her writings. Walker depicts an distorted consciousness in her protagonists. So I intend to trace the protagonists’ physical and mental struggles and their life based on the black female community in this novel. Especially, I’v set a goal to examine the author's strategies of both sexes equality. Walker links the sexual oppression of black women to the patriarchal ideology. The Color Purple shows us the very positive portrayals of homosexual love, and that of lesbian love for equality of both sexes. The Color Purple embodies the greatest equality of both sexes, which is to collapse the inhumane categories and to seek the dignity of human life. It contains her belief that life should achieve the harmonious wholeness, that is, the happy life of gender equality. And the black female community contains a new paradigm enhancing gender equality and homosexuality. At the end of the novel, by sharing quilting with Albert, Celie regains the equality of both sexes being crushed by the patriarchal system. Ultimately, Celie completes her relationships with both men and women. I dare say that this equality of both sexes represents Walker’s theme of a principle of human rights for the future oriented society.

The Meaning of Ghosts in The Turn of the Screw:A Deconstructive ApproachByungjoo ParkThis paper aims to find out the meaning of ghosts by analyzing The Turn of the Screw with a deconstructive perspective.Generally, criticism on this novel has been divided into three groups: the psychological approach, the anti-psychological approach and the autobiographical approach. But though they have led to some stimulating criticism, it seems to be misreading. They reduced this novel to the very simplified versions by fixing the meaning of ghosts.Therefore, I interpreted governess’s tale in terms of deconstructive criticism to find out the meaning of ghosts. A ghost is neither present nor absent in the story itself. But the governess attempts to fix a single meaning to two ghosts by insisting that two ghosts are Quint and Jessel respectively. I explored that James's position is not to tell just a ghost story but to show that ghosts are the products of the governess's obsessive interpretation.This paper shows that James is at once establishing non-origin in the place of origin and focusing our attention on the question of the origin. After all, James at once reveals and conceals the question of the origin.Finally, we can say that this novel is a riddle that teaches us something essential about dangers of interpretation.

This study aims to discuss D. H. Lawrence’s and Toni Morrison’s contextual traits of primitive being in The Rainbow, Women in Love, and Song of Solomon. It is a matter of course that Lawrence’s sexual-philosophical theme doesn’t seem to be in contextual line with Morrison’s racial-sexual-sociological one. Yet, Lawrence and Morrison share critical perspectives in that their societies are governed by white traditional value-systems, such as capitalistic materialism, mechanic consistency, and white heroism. And these shared perspectives project their ideal aims on the restoration of the primitive being which is scorned by the civil code of white capitalistic society and its value-systems. Lawrence’s and Morrison’s insistence on the restoration of the primitive being reflects their perception that man has lived most of his life in basic contact with the principles of nature and his being is formed by that experience. In The Rainbow and Women in Love, Lawrence truly intends to say that the primitive being is more fundamental and active than the civic element. But the pivotal thing Lawrence attempts to show in these novels is that the physical being is not all man wants and that the physical satisfaction which marriage may bring isn’t perfect. The ideal aim he projects in his novels is that of a mutually coordinated physical-spiritual fulfillment. He shows his ideal aim of this kind through Ursula’s and Birkin’s efforts which mutually search for an inter-perceptive and inter-subjective basis in their relationship and in their continuing development of self-fulfillment and self-creation. Meanwhile, in Song of Solomon, Morrison symbolically uses the character Macon Dead to criticize the fetishization of materialism and bourgeoisie value-systems just as Lawrence does in his novels. Her intention is to suggest that Macon’s materialism and value-system connected to it go against the spirit and brotherhood of black society. Therefore, taking subversive action against Macon, the pivotal thing on which she paradoxically insists in this novel is that the spirit and brotherhood of black society is originally like Pilate’s inter-subjective way of life based on the principle of nature. Unlike her brother Macon who is governed by materialism, Pilate lives an ethereal life in a furnitureless cabin devoid of such civic conveniences as gas, electricity etc.— a spiritual life that she found as a child on Lincoln’s Heaven. And Morrison projects her concept of primitive being on Pilate’s life of this kind, getting her to initiate Milkman’s birth and lead his spiritual rebirth from his father’s cover of materialism to his primitive- mythological roots. Therefore, Morrison’s idea of primitive being reflected in Pilate and her way of life is not different from Lawrence’s in terms of how the principles of nature are closely connected with the incarnation of a spiritual value-system.

Law, Crime and Punishment in The Scarlet LetterYounghee ChangThat Hawthorne was an acute intellectual and social historian is by now widely accepted by the scholars. But Hawthorne’s greatest concern with the New England past was, more often than not, focused on its law and the various systems of jurisprudence and punishment. One explanation is that the psychological and biographical circumstances of Hawthorne’s life pulled him to the repeated examination of his own past, which was largely Puritan and included some of his ancestors’ legal persecution of some innocent people. Hawthorne was especially interested in the ‘letter punishment’ of the Puritan society, which eventually led him to writing The Scarlet Letter. In a way, then, the novel is about a conflict between law and the individual, and centering on Hester’s sin, this is inevitably connected to the conflict between an oppressive Puritan law that coerces consent and demand obedience from individuals, and a natural law under which individual desire can flourish into happiness.In terms of these two kinds of laws, the four major characters neatly fall into two campsDimmesdale and Chillingworth on the side of the “iron framework” of legal instrumentalism of the Puritan society and Hester and Pearl on the other side of the natural law which is a basic assumption for human happiness.Through the book, Hawthorne may want to suggest any law that seeks to extract the last ounce of humanity and individuality from the offender represents a transgression far more serious than Hester and Dimmesdale’s. Then Hawthorne’s ultimate purpose of writing The Scarlet Letter may be to introduce what he calls “the forgotten art of gaiety” to his contemporaries.

Brown worked on Arthur Mervyn longer than any other novels of his. After publishing the first part of Arthur Mervyn, Brown wrote Edgar Huntly and then he finished the second part of Arthur Mervyn, which is actually the final novel of his. Therefore, the novel presented the changes of Brown’s ideas on writing, career, and society better than any other works. The protagonist of Arthur Mervyn is an object of intense, often suspicious scrutiny. His ambiguity stems from the uncertainty of his fluctuating goals and values. The “diseased” atmosphere of Philadelphia so overwhelmed the novel that the work took on dark shadow. For Brown, the unrelenting yellow fever came to symbolize a pervasive social as well as biological sickness. Though perhaps not his best novel, Arthur Mervyn is the one most revealing about himself as a writer in America. Brown’s unsettling portrayal of social disarray, institutional failure, and personal incoherence in late eighteenth-century America ends on a note of cultural capitulation. Faced with a moral spectacle of rampant fraud, venality, and confusion, Arthur offers a complex vision of the new American type of character; alternately well-meaning and self-interested, a mass of insecurities covered by a thin veneer of excessive confidence, drifting wildly between greed and benevolence with no firm moral bearings. The treachery of urban market-place society was replicated in interaction between the sexes, and Brown punctuated Arthur Mervyn with incidents of destructive gender tensions. Arthur’s involvement with Asha Fielding culminates the novel’s troubled portrayal of gender relations. The retreat to the bosom of his “good mamma” provides Arthur with an escape, both from his family problems and from the social pressures. The novel comes to a close with the protagonist reconstituting family and renouncing self, then joyfully retiring to Europe, Arthur’s marriage to Asha Fielding is as much as expression of his withdrawal from the social and economic struggle of modernizing American society. It also is the indirect expression of Brown’s deep frustration as well as his profound criticism on American society where it is almost impossible to pursue one’s dream.

A Study of Heinz Insu Fenkle’s Memories of My Ghost BrotherSungran ChoIn this paper I discuss Heinz Insu Fenkle’s Memories of My Ghost Brother as the art from the contact zone of Korean-American culture clash in Kijichon, a Korean town of Pupyung, periphery to the American Army base. The text functions as “autoethnographical” text as Fenkl himself argues, first by representing the mixed-race children’s subjectivity from inside as opposed to portrayed (or erased) by others from outside and secondly by juxtaposing foregoing narrative plot with story-telling of Korean folklores.Significantly, the novel-literary memoir suggests different views of American Dream and offers literary questresurrectionand mourning for ghost brother and various other lonely ghosts which haunt history, and thus, the novel. The interstitial art which defies even demonstration of one genre in the end offers photographic, visual, as well as literary portrait of one compassionate child’s travails of melancholic growing up in the borderland of Korea/America. The interspersed reflection of the adult consciousness shows his maturity into an artist.

The Conflicts of a Balance between Self and Others in Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass and Kate Chopin’s The AwakeningUirak KimIn Leaves of Grass, Walt Whitman stimulates a balance between individuality and brotherhood; and he encourages the individual to venture himself on the open road of life in order to make sense of life and reach eventual perfection. His poems are affirmations of simultaneous self-love and sympathy for others combined with spiritual venture. Chopin traces Edna’s awakening to her individuality. Chopin’s Edna’s selfishness stems from the lack of sympathy and identity with others. Unlike Whitman, Edna weaves her song only from herself. Whitman values sympathy and identity in his celebration of self. This paper explores Whitman’s philosophy as it relates to the downfall of Edna Pontellier the protagonist of Kate Chopin’s The Awakening in modern American fictionwhose self-absorption excludes love or concern for others and whose material goals are void of self-satisfaction due to the fact that the self is not ventured in attaining them. Especially, this paper demonstrates Whitman’s idea of balance between sympathy and supremacy of the individual along with his notion of ventures as possible solution to the sense of alienation, loss and despair prevalent in Chopin’s works.

Artists in a Marketplace:Art and Multinational Capitalism inDon DeLillo’s Mao II and UnderworldEunju HwangThis essay investigates DeLillo’s view of art and artist in the late capitalist society. In Mao II, Don DeLillo writes about the disappearance of the aura and the status of author in the late capitalist society. In the novel, he is depicting a world in which art is no more than a consumer product and an artist himself a product to sell. Due to mechanical reproduction and mass media, according to the novel, art has become much inferior to terrorism in its power to shape mass consciousness, and the author has lost his aura as the originator of the meaning of his text. Bill Gray, knowing the principles of the market, walks the tightrope between silence and fame; he deliberately removes himself from the audience in order to increase his fame, his cash values. His anonymous death, the survival of his copyright, and his portraits that would replace him by inheriting his “specious aura” crystalize the reduced status of the author in the contemporary society. On the other hand, in Underworld, DeLillo searches for a redemptive power from art. In a world of waste, where only waste maintains its “aura” due to its “untouchability,” DeLillo still finds the only source for hope from the power of art. Artists like Moonman who is not co-opted by capitalism and people like Esmeralda who can never be contained within the system give people hope in the novel. DeLillo himself also sheds off the “specious aura” of the artist for sale by creating redemptive moments and images in his novel and writing an “underhistory” of the multinational capitalist society.

A Vital Fragment: A Reading ofNathaniel Hawthorne’s The Scarlet LetterJaekwang HwangThis essay discusses Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter in terms of a fragmentary text structured by the differential play of language. The discussion is centered upon “The “Custom House” and the concluding part of the novel because a fragmentary text of this sort always problematizes the ideas of textual origin and closure. In his preface to The Marble Faun, Hawthorne remarks that “Ruin” serves as an indispensable component in making his “Romance” grow. He also complained about the lack of Ruin in his dear native land, that is, America. Yet the author was oblivious about the fact that he, to write The Scarlet Letter, had invented the scarlet symbol and some fragmentary texts as a substitute for ruin. In many respects, the scarlet symbol in the fiction can be construed not only as ruin but also as a fragment in that it is a fraction of a signifier. Indeed, Hawthorne appropriates the continuity between sign and ruin in rendering The Scarlet Letter into a semantic fragment that resembles the symbolic fragment of the German and British Romantics. For this reason, it also anticipates an innovated writing style which is in keeping with post-modern literary theories. Like a fragment or ruin, the scarlet letter A conceals the originary moment of its creation, the presence of its author, and its full image or referent. It also acts like a decentering signifier that challenges the possibility of an outline, groundwork, a beginning, an end, a totality and a closure in the fiction. With its predilection for the differential play of the scarlet symbol, The Scarlet Letter prefigures the anti-essentialist view of literary texts.